Golding had difficulty breaking into print; his first novel was only just rescued from the rejection from which Faber’s reader, the famous Polly Perkins, had consigned it with the words ‘Absurd and uninteresting fantasy … rubbish and dull. Pointless’. After that, too, many of Golding’s novels were often greeted with a certain amount of carping. Even some of his best novels, such as Free Fall came out to a torrent of abuse. He never took the trouble to meet fellow authors, and at a Booker dinner in the 1970s is reported as sitting there with his wife, knowing nobody at all. Amazingly, in 1979, he was so humiliated, on a first trip to the London Library, not to have known what ‘quarto’ meant on the catalogue cards that he had to console himself with dinner and drinks with Angus Wilson. He is surprisingly difficult to envisage in relation to any of the literary movements of the postwar period, neither Angry Young Man, nor mystic, nor magic realist, nor historical novelist except in the most literal sense. The crucial events of his life, we might conclude after reading this biography, were nothing to do with his books, but might be such tragedies as his abandonment of sailing after the loss of his boat Tenace and coming close to death. His best novels are the untidiest and initially most puzzling, such as the strange autobiographical fantasy Free Fall and that magnificent mythological take on late-seventies sociological despair, Darkness Visible. No: he deserves to be read in bulk.

The personality uncovered by Carey is an awkward one, self-punishing and full of fears and worries. A good deal of pre-publicity for this biography has centred on the idea that Golding committed rape in youth.

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